Battlefield 6, developed by EA and DICE with Ripple Effect contributing, will launch without ray-tracing and the studio says there are no near-term plans to add it. The game is due on October 10th. Developers also say the PC build will ship with over 600 graphics settings to help players tune performance.
Christian Buhl, Studio Technical Director at Ripple Effect, spoke to the press about the choice in an interview you can read in the Comicbook interview. He was blunt: the team decided early to leave ray-tracing out so they could concentrate on baseline performance across a wide range of hardware.
“No, we are not going to have ray-tracing when the game launches and we don’t have any plans in the near future for it either,” Buhl explained. “That was because we wanted to focus on performance. We wanted to make sure that all of our effort was focused on making the game as [optimized] as possible for the default settings and the default users. So, we just made the decision relatively early on that we just weren’t going to do ray-tracing and again, it was mostly so that we could focus on making sure it was performance for everyone else.”
Well, that reads like a straightforward trade-off: some visual bells and whistles versus consistent frame rates for large multiplayer matches. The studio’s logic is understandable, as ray-tracing consumes GPU headroom, but it’s still somewhat odd to see a 2025 AAA title launch without a feature that many other current games include.
The emphasis on performance is tied to scale. Buhl and the team expect players to tweak settings, which explains the over 600 graphics settings count on PC, and they want a stable baseline for matches with many players. Is that a fair trade for the broader player base?
Community response so far has been mixed but generally pragmatic: some players want the prettier lighting, while a larger slice says steady performance in massive matches matters more. We won’t know how well the decision lands until the servers go live on October 10th and players start comparing results across hardware.
Share your thoughts with us on X and Bluesky while the debate heats up.
